Summary
Chapter 11: The Battle of the Knids
Wonka asks Grandpa Joe to lower down the steel rope. The Knids see this and start attacking the Elevator again. The Elevator is tossed around precariously, but it manages to tow the Capsule away.
Charlie waves and gives a thumbs-up to the astronauts, who are completely flabbergasted. Both Grandmas scream out that they see a large cloud of Knid that is flying level with the Elevator. Charlie sees the cloud changing shape into a long serpent. It begins to tie the Elevator up like a parcel.
Charlie glances at the Capsule, where the people inside are white with terror. Now the Knids move themselves into hooks and stretch out farther and farther, trying to link up with the one tied up around the Elevator. Grandma Josephine gasps that they are being taken away to the planet Vermes.
The old ones yell at Wonka and he admits he is at a loss. When Josephine wails that she wants to go home, Wonka suddenly knows what to do: he orders Charlie to press the REENTRY button. The Elevator plunges down at record speed, and the Commuter Capsule trails behind it.
They are going so fast that sparks fly off the sides. The Knid tries frantically to disengage but cannot. All of the Knids that are close in the chain begin to sizzle and become Shooting Knids.
Mrs. Bucket, who rarely speaks, says she does not know what is going on but she does not like it. Grandma Georgina wonders if they will hit, and Charlie states that he is sure there are parachutes. Wonka laughs that parachutes are for astronauts and sissies: they want to speed up. The old ones scream that he is crazy.
The Elevator detaches the Commuter Capsule and plunges down to the Factory.
Chapter 12: Back to the Chocolate Factory
There is a tremendous crunching, crashing, and splintering sound as the Elevator lands. However, when the light comes on, the old ones are in bed and the rest are standing as if nothing happened.
The Elevator doors open onto the Chocolate Factory itself. There, everything is eatable--the river, the trees, the grass, and more. Hundreds of tiny Oompa-Loompas greet them happily.
The drums start up, and the creatures begin to sing of being worried that Wonka would not return home. Wonka laughs and asks for help with getting the bed out of the Elevator. He then addresses the old ones and says they ought to get up now and help in the Factory. They are indignant and refuse to do so.
Chapter 13: How Wonka-Vite was Invented
Wonka suggests they might like getting out of bed, but they are uninterested. However, Charlie notices Wonka’s eyes twinkling. Wonka muses that he has something that might be of use here, but it is too precious to waste. The old ones wonder what he means, and they demand that he tell them. Wonka is silent and lets their curiosity grow. Finally, he begins to tell them about an invention that can make people younger. It was a long, arduous process to create, but it worked: an elderly, wheelchair-bound Oompa-Loompa became handsome, young, and strong again.
Grandma Josephine inquires why Wonka himself has not taken it. Wonka merely replies that anyone can ask questions, but it is the answers that count. She asks to see the Oompa-Loompa; Wonka gestures to a small one leaping about gaily.
The Oompa-Loompa band strikes up again, and the singers chant a tale of how Wonk-Vite helps people regain their youth, beauty, and vitality.
Chapter 14: Recipe for Wonka-Vite
Wonka pulls out a bottle of pills and announces that this is the most valuable bottle of pills in the world; that is why he has not taken them, for they are too valuable to waste on himself.
Everyone peers at the bottle. Inside, the pills seem to vibrate, shimmer, blur, and wriggle. Grandma Georgina is unnerved by the wriggling and asks if they will jump around inside her. Grandma Josephine says she must know what is in them.
Wonka searches for the recipe and reads off what it contains, which is a block of chocolate filled with, among other things, a cow horn, a corn from the toe of a unihorn, the snout of a proghopper, and the hide and seek of a spotted whangdoodle. The mixture must boil for twenty-seven days but cannot be stirred; then, the liquid will evaporate, and only a hard brown lump will remain. Inside that is one pill of Wonka-Vite.
Chapter 15: Good-bye, Georgina
Charlie asks Wonka haltingly if he is sure everything is exactly right, since he remembers what happened to Violet Beauregarde. Wonka smiles that Charlie ought not to be worried because Violet snatched the gum without permission. These pills are safe and Wonka-recommended.
Mr. Bucket pipes up. He has been looking around the Factory; this usually timid man is inspired by everything in it. He urges the old ones to seize the opportunity to become young again.
Wonka warns them that the pills are very powerful. The Oompa-Loompas begin to chant; the old people in the bed are now excited and grab for the bottle. They fight over the pills but Wonka turns his back; he hates squabbles.
Wonka muses on how powerful these pills are; they can do more than money can. He can still hear them fighting shrilly, and he sighs. Grandpa Joe chastises them, and Charlie urges them to be careful about how many they consume.
Finally, Grandpa George, Grandma Josephine, and Grandma Georgina prepare to ingest the pills. They toast to youth and beauty. Wonka only peers out of the corner of his eye, but he hears Charlie exclaiming. He then hears Joe wondering at how young Josie is. Mrs. Bucket’s voice turns to alarm. Charlie and Grandpa Joe begin to yell in shock that they are going way too far. Mrs. Bucket screams that her mother has vanished, Grandpa Joe says in a dazed tone that his wife is now a baby, and Mr. Bucket is amused that Grandpa George is also a baby.
Mrs. Bucket’s wails become louder as she asks Wonka what happened. Wonka comes over and tells them soothingly that there is nothing to worry about. The rest of them are incredulous at his calm. Wonka looks upset and says he wishes people could be more sensible and simply listen to him; after all, he warned them about the pills.
Wonka tries to guess how many Grandma Josephine took, and with a flash of glee realizes she is now three months old and Grandpa George is one year old. Mrs. Bucket interjects and asks about her own mother. Wonka tells her simply that she has vanished because she went below the years she had. Everyone is flummoxed. Wonka explains that Grandma Georgina will have to wait it out in the Waiting Room.
The Oompa-Loompa drums sound again and hundreds begin to sing and sway. They sing a song of Goldie Pinklesweet who went to stay with her Granny in Kent. One day, Granny said she was going to do some shopping, though she really wanted some gin. After she left, Goldie looked through all of Granny’s pills and gobbled up the delicious-looking ones. Unfortunately, they were the most powerful laxatives, and it was not long before Goldie started feeling awful. The rumblings were horrific, and they were so loud that neighbors thought it was a thunderstorm. Goldie clutched her stomach in fright. Granny came home, saw her, and was angry that her pills were gone. She called the ambulance, though, and begged them to hurry or the girl would explode. At the hospital, they did many things to Goldie and thought she might die, but she made it out alive. Her father came and fetched her home. Sadly, though, the vestiges of what happened to her never fully left, and she had to spend seven hours a day in the Ladies' Room. There she sat and dreamed of glory that she could never achieve. This, then, is the moral: “Do promise us across your heart / That you will never help yourself / To medicine from the medicine shelf” (120).
Analysis
Dahl doesn’t spend as much time talking about the Chocolate Factory in this work as he did in its predecessor, but he still conjures up a magical, edible world where Charlie gets to reign supreme: “Charlie found himself looking out once again at the great Chocolate Room with the chocolate river and the chocolate waterfall, where everything was eatable – the trees, the leaves, the grass, the pebbles and even the rocks. And there to meet them were hundreds and hundreds of tiny Oompa-Loompas, waving and cheering. It was a sight to that took one’s breath away” (88). As Margaret Talbot notes, “Dahl is brilliant at evoking the childhood obsession with candy, which most adults can recall only vaguely…Dahl’s evocation of candy is an impetus to wonder.” This is the world that Charlie inherited because of his gentle, honest, and humble soul--a reward of perpetual childhood.
The image of chocolate, however, is also paralleled by that of Goldie Pinklesweet’s trials and intestinal turmoil. Many critics have focused on this strange and coarse example of bathroom humor. Hamida Bosmajian discusses Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator in terms of what he calls “the excremental vision,” claiming both books are sweet but “nasty” and the Factory itself is “sinister” with machinery that “is organism and artifice as well as a sweet conversion of the factory as polluter.” It is “anal retentive” and “the dynamics of ingestion, digestion, and excretion permeate the underground terrain.” The novels use “the amoral relationship between jokes and the unconscious” to “[release] a child’s anxieties about bodily functions, physical injury, and death.”
Turning to Goldie’s story specifically, it is one where a child takes her grandmother’s laxatives, almost explodes, and is forever confined for seven hours a day to the toilet. Her greed was what doomed her to this, and the Oompa-Loompas tell the story after the grandparents swallowed the Wonka-Vite. Bosmajian writes, “the euphemism of the chocolate-covered Ex-Lax is the figure on the ground of primal aggression and guilt in an artificial world.”
Grandpa George, Grandma Georgina, and Grandma Josephine are the Goldie Pinklesweets of this tale. They greedily desired youth and beauty, and they could not control themselves when taking the pills of Wonka-Vite, thus sending them back into childhood and beyond. They are classic examples of Dahl punishing adults for behaving badly: for being greedy, selfish, and obnoxious. Wonka, who most likely knew this very thing would happen but did nothing to prevent it, muses, “He hated squabbles. He hated it when people got grabby and selfish… It was an unhappy truth that nearly all people in the world behave badly when there is something really big at stake” (107).
When Wonka finally turns back to the situation with the youthful grandparents, he says morosely, “Why don’t they listen to me when I tell them something? I explained very carefully beforehand that each pill makes the taker exactly twenty years younger” (113-14). Despite the fact that Wonka is correct about his warning the old ones, there is still something about this situation that feels off. Wonka is a keen observer of people and has been dealing with the old ones for some time now. He knows their nature, and he could no doubt guess how they would respond when offered these pills. He knows how powerful those pills are, how they “were bigger than money. They could do things for you that no amount of money could ever do” (107). Right before he began to explain about them, Charlie had noticed “those bright little eyes beginning to spark and twinkle once again. Ha-Ha, thought Charlie. What’s coming now?” (91). It seems like a solid guess that Wonka knew exactly how all of this was going to play out and that he was probably doing it to punish the grandparents for their bad behavior. However, this is ultimately cruel because if Wonka understands how humans work--how these humans work--and deliberately offers them what he knows they can’t refuse, then he is the problem. Furthermore, this is cruel to Charlie, whom Wonka professes to love. Children might not pick up on this problematic dynamic of Wonka’s character, but it is a fascinating one for adult readers to ponder.
